Strike highlights lack of female writers

When Traub hires new writers she looks for diverse voices, raw talent and someone she wouldn't mind spending long hours with at work.

"There's no place I'd rather be than in the room with my staff," she said. "The writers room is home for me."

While her staff often draws on their own experiences, Traub maintains that one of the key skills of a good writer is to put themselves in someone else's shoes, and write for any character, regardless of the character's gender or race or age.

Traub is one of the few female showrunners who have landed that prestige position and created their own show.

As more women become showrunners and studio bosses, Hollywood is beginning to value women's voices in the writers room, said Kimberly Myers, the WGA's diversity director.

Women are well-represented in the guild's training sessions for aspiring managers, while the guild's "women's committee" meets regularly and women showrunners began an informal group.

"It takes time for things to change," said Myers. "As the number of women writers increases and they become more visible and prominent, more women will be drawn into the profession."

Myers said Shonda Rhimes, who created "Grey's Anatomy," is an example of how the industry is more open to women creating and managing their own shows, and talent winning out over connections and habit.

Female guild members who write for television bring home the same median earnings as men, about $94,000, but that doesn't include extra income paid to showrunners that doesn't get reported to the WGA.

Women who write features make only $50,000 per year to a man's $90,000, though there's been a slight decline in the percentage of women writing for film.

"Studios are concentrating on giant blockbusters and those are young, male-driven movies," said Myers, while fewer romantic comedies are being produced.

"It's a good-old-boy thing. You give the job to someone who has a track record, and those people are men. It's self-perpetuating," said Diane Saltzberg, who has sold scripts to MGM.

Saltzberg said some female screenwriters submit scripts with only their initials to avoid a reader's bias.

"Sexism is just another -ism that you have to deal with in this town, like ageism and weightism," but women sometimes suffer from these biases more than men, she said. "Once I had a tasteful gray streak in my hair and my writing partner said she wouldn't go into a meeting with me until I got rid of it."

Saltzberg said the success of young writers like Diablo Cody, who wrote "Juno," means women will have a better chance of seeing their names in lights in the future.

"I like the old cream-rises-to-the-top idea," she said. "Male or female, it should be about the words on the pages."

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